How do you get someone to give your technology platform another shot after they’ve already convinced themselves that it isn’t good enough?

At First Choice Power (FCP), we had the best technology in the electricity industry, but most energy brokers didn’t know it and refused to give it a second chance. In the early days of our custom-built pricing and credit checking portal, the user interface was clunky, our prices were higher than most of the major competitors, and our company’s brand was mostly known for working with residential clients. Many of the energy brokers that gave the portal a look in its first year had determined that it would never match the leading competitor’s platform, so our technology was used by less than 10% of our potential broker partnerships.

Clearly, we needed a long-term strategy to turn the tide; what happened next is legendary. First, we launched Phase I and spent twelve months relentlessly addressing how a user would want to encounter this technology. Some brokers wanted to serve themselves in the portal, while others desired more of a push solution that would deliver results to their email each day.

When navigating a client’s account, brokers had a variety of internal processes at their respective companies. This led us to build a “choose your own adventure” model where a user could collect the necessary approvals for a client’s credit, usage verification, start date, term length, contract specifications, broker margins, and a wide variety of pricing options in any order they desired. Once the client’s record was complete, the portal would auto-price the account every morning, and users could produce an executable contract within seconds of making the request. Each aspect of the FCP portal far outpaced the competitor’s technology, which was irrelevant because the brokers didn’t know it.

Then, we moved on to Phase II – a complete redesign of the look, feel, and usability of every screen. We intentionally crafted the words on every page, the interactions with each button or action item, and the clean but unique aesthetics. We also included a tribute to teamwork with our pee-wee football imagery on the portal homepage.

The stage was set for Phase III – promotion! We coordinated a plan to gain the attention of the top 100 energy brokerage shops through a multipronged approach. First, we delivered cakes with the new portal cover page image to the brokers’ offices nationwide and some great swag announcing that Portal 2.0 had launched. Next, we delivered a professionally animated video spotlighting the superior performance of Portal 2.0 versus the competition.

The best marketing move was the giveaway challenge we launched the following week. Each day, Benji Coomer would appear somewhere on Portal 2.0 throughout the day. You never knew when, and you never knew on which page. The first broker to email the sales department letting us know where they found Benji, along with the screenshot to prove it, would receive whatever prize Benji was holding in the picture for that day. This includes iPads and gift cards of great value, but the grand prize was the best. On Friday, to celebrate the release of Portal 2.0, the winning broker won two airplane tickets anywhere in the world.

Think about what we did. We built the best technology and had all of the pieces in place before making our huge push to get brokers re-engaged. Then, through the digital and physical hype, we got the brokers’ attention before unleashing the best move, the “Where’s Benji Contest.” That led dozens and dozens of energy brokers to search through every page of Portal 2.0, navigating from one screen to the next in search of Benji. By looking for him each day, they came to know the incredible capabilities and ease of use that had been a part of Portal 2.0 for years. We did it. We convinced brokers to change their habits, and in the process, we changed the growth trajectory of FCP.

Our marketing moves to engage the brokers in FCP’s commercial pricing led to twelve quarters in a row of double-digit growth in megawatt hours served. That is compounding growth, and it would have never been possible without the best technology AND the actual adoption of the Portal 2.0 platform. When FCP sold for a premium valuation a few years later, the buyer named our commercial sales growth and the industry’s leading tech, Portal 2.0, as primary factors for the favorable pricing.